Chapter Text
So, here was what Tony Stark knew: He'd ordered some of that cutting edge, top of the line product from Hammer Industries-not under the Stark Industries banner, of course, but through a dummy corporation. Literally the CEO of said fake company was Dum-E. After seeing footage of Hammer testing out his own copycat suits in Iran at the Senate hearing-seriously, did no one have a single, creative, original thought anymore?-Tony had another thing to be put on edge about. Because, obviously, he needed more of that in his life what with palladium poisoning and the government trying to take his tech for their own ends and surrendering control of his company to Pepper and so on. Hammer's suits weren't for sale yet and hopefully never would be, but Tony thought it might be worthwhile to catalog, dismantle, and have a ready deterrent for whatever his rival company's latest and greatest was in the event some of it had been developed to work in tandem with said suits.
He could use the distraction from his imminent death, after all.
The man who sold the items to Dum-E's business was named Johnson and carried himself confidently through text. The date of delivery was yesterday afternoon while Tony was busy doing busy person things. The price tag was something spectacular and he'd sent the receipts off to an accountant to verify everything but that was the boring part and he didn't pay much attention to that. It was all delivered to some dockside warehouse in Brooklyn before he had his people bring it back to his neck of the woods and finally it all sat here on the fifty-eighth floor of his office building in Manhattan. Yeah, the tall one that's a block up from Central Park but only because if he owned a building that tall right next to Central Park he wouldn't be able to see all of it without really craning his neck at an awkward, downward angle with his nose to the glass. And he liked the entirety of it, not just three quarters of it.
Here was what Tony Stark didn't know: What the hell was in the big giant metal box that looked like a one-person submarine that was humming sort of loudly and had (probably) mysterious things written on it in Cyrillic letters. He'd stared at it for a minute, then shifted his eyes to the more appropriately sized crates that should be filled with weapons and armor and computery things and whatnot. They were, so that much was correct. But as far as he could remember, nothing he'd ordered should be this large.
The only way to find out what a thing you don't know is is, is to open it and use it and hope you push all the buttons in the right order so that's what Tony did. He asked Jarvis for a translation on the Cyrillic and got back some of the usual 'this side up' and 'fragile' labels. Because who doesn't transport your standard fragile material in a box made with five inch thick steel walls. Or he thought it was steel anyway. It didn't resonate the same when he rapped his knuckles on it-a very intelligent thing to do to a mystery box from a weapons manufacturer marked fragile but he was a very intelligent man.
Some of the other labels were a little more intriguing. Stuff about flow of liquid nitrogen, caution with the cables, if power is lost and backup generator fails, defrost contents at once and follow stand-by protocols. He wondered briefly if he bought some kind of bomb or uranium cores or something but he knew liquid nitrogen wasn't exactly enough bang for radioactive decay's buck. Plus he didn't exactly recall purchasing anything that volatile. That left him with one idea. Some kind of computer or robot, something that burned through an immense amount of energy, but to do what?
"Okay, Jarvis," he said, hands on his hips as he finished contemplating the contents and was eager to open it like a kid on Christmas. "Tell me what you can figure out about thawing this stuff."
"Already done, sir. The process is emblazoned on the side of the tank."
Tony walked around to find it, the raised weirdo moonspeak letters. "Does it say what's in it?" His eyes wandered from the letters to the scratches on the edge of the door. Or gouges, rather. Maybe somebody tried to open the thing with a crowbar and missed the mark a couple of times.
"Not specifically, sir, but the material is organic in nature."
"Organic," Tony muttered. That was pretty low on the list of things he expected to be in the box. Had he been sent a bunch of organs? Why such a heavy-duty container? And the whole stand-by part still didn't make sense in the context of anything organic. "So I just could've gone to Whole Foods for this?"
"Perhaps, if they sold medical equipment and employed MDs."
"So it's very organic," Tony said, brows raising slightly. Whatever it was, it was alive and the intent was to get it through the thawing process also still alive. What a pain in the ass. "Well," he said, tapping on the frosted glass. "We're going to find out if you're worth it."
It was a lot easier to bring the medical stuff to the tank than vice versa so Tony went with that option. He was in the process of having that done when Pepper wandered in. No, she didn't wander. Probably had this exact moment-two thirty-seven p.m.-marked in her schedule as 'make sure Stark isn't killing himself or others with accident-prone robots'. Her eyes found what all the hustle and bustle of the interns moving medical equipment up here was about and she stared almost like she didn't want to believe this thing was in the room. "What on Earth did you buy this time?"
"I don't know but the good news is it's organic, so it'll be healthy. Doesn't appear to meet USDA free-range regulations though so if you have a moral dilemma about that, now's the time to leave."
"What do you mean 'organic'?"
"Something alive. Or previously alive and now in a liquid nitrogen coma. Or dead."
"Tony, there's not a person in there, is there?" She whipped her head around so fast he thought her hair might slice his right off his shoulders.
He shrugged.
"How can you be so flippant about that possibility?"
"How can you be so worried about it when we haven't even gotten the thing open yet?" He waved a hand at her as she pressed her lips together. "Don't worry. I highly doubt it's a person. Cryogenics haven't exactly been perfected yet so the only people who get frozen are dead ones and I doubt they've started putting corpses up for sale. My guess is..." Well, he didn't really have many. Biological agents started to come to mind but again the instructions to put the contents into 'stand-by' mode or whatever made that sound wrong. That and all of the necessary medical equipment was more fit for something a bit larger than a handful of cells in a petri dish. So he said instead, "Mammoths. Of the woolly variety. Maybe found in some glacier."
"What would Hammer Industries be doing with woolly mammoths?" she asked, clearly not buying it.
He shrugged again but felt mildly entertained at the notion of weaponized woolly mammoths. "What would they be doing with a frozen dead guy?" he asked back. "Come on, Pep. I'm sure it's fine. We're about to open it, so you'll see. If you have the time to stick around?"
She looked at him and he felt like a schoolkid making his crush a little too obvious so he cleared his throat. "Well, now I have to know," she said, crossing her arms over her chest, hugging some kind of folder to herself in the process.
"Of course you have to know," Tony said. He glanced around the room which had been completely rearranged by now. The list of needed things wasn't that extensive, really, but it hadn't included one thing Tony thought an organic mystery creature would want most of all upon being hoisted out of a tank of liquid nitrogen, and that was a comfy blanket. He held onto that one personally while a pair of doctors who had repeatedly tried to inform Tony they had no idea about any of this and were doctors, not veterinarians, waited with some obvious agitation by the gurney. Tony only had cots in person size, so if it was a mammoth or something of similar largeness, he'd have to work something else out. Possibly push two cots together, much like a large party of people invading a restaurant whose tables weren't really suited for the entirety of their group.
"Okay, here we go," Tony said under his breath, a little knot of anticipation tying up his stomach. The more he thought about it, the more he hoped it was a mammoth. Some other prehistoric creature would also be acceptable. Could he fashion a suit for a saber toothed tiger? Because that would be pretty badass in a fight. Iron Man and his attack tiger, the Iron Saber. But then again, Tony Stark: mammoth-owner, had a nice ring to it and would look great printed on the cover of tabloids. He already had their cover photo in his head. He'd be strolling through the park in winter time while his adorable, fluffy little pet frolicked in the snow.
He returned his focus to carrying out the instructions as translated by Jarvis. The loud humming of the box got a little quieter and he could see bubbles in the tubes as the liquid nitrogen supply cut off slowly. There were a series of loud clunking noises which he figured were bolts or other locking mechanisms sliding out of place and it made him wonder again why this tank was so heavily secured. He nodded to the pair of dazed interns to go ahead and open the box so they could all find out. Everyone leaned forward whether they realized it or not, even though all they could see now was a very chilly vapor bubbling over the sides of the tank. Tony approached and didn't miss a stunned expression on the face of the intern nearest the tank. So mammoth. So definitely mammoth. He waved his arm to clear the vapor and get a good look and-
Good bye tabloid cover.
It was a person. Which was weird and scary but also intriguing and asked him why why why like a three year old who'd just learned the word. The fog cleared a little more and made the mystery even more intriguing because, hi, yes, glacier man had a metal arm. "Well," he muttered at that because it wasn't just some vague approximation of a human limb like most prosthetics. It was gorgeous. A marvel of engineering. He hardly believed it was real metal at first, maybe some kind of weird paint job, but no. The symmetry with the right arm was exact, and a thousand more questions popped into his head.
"Well what?" Pepper asked a few steps back and Tony froze. Well, froze seemed like such a strong word as he leaned over a man literally encased in ice but language was a funny thing.
"Um," was all he could say for a second. It was enough.
She rushed over to the tank and her brows arched up in a way that told him she wasn't really pleased with what she was seeing. "Tony you said-"
"I speculated. Speculations can be wrong," he said, waving a hand at the body in the tank.
"Why did you buy a person?" she snapped.
"I didn't," he insisted adamantly because he didn't. He didn't buy and sell live human beings, or frozen ones either, just to be safe. He had enough bad karma stacked against him and didn't need to risk adding 'human trafficking' to that. "You can check, nowhere on that receipt is there an item marked 'ice cyborg'."
"Do we uh-" one of the doctors asked. The other was staring because how could you not?
"Well, yes," Tony said as if it was obvious.
"What?!" Pepper cried shrilly. "You don't know what you're doing! That guy could be ill with something terminal or-Do you even know how to unfreeze a person because the rest of the modern scientific world doesn't!"
"Luckily he comes with directions. Like a hot pocket."
"Tony I swear if you put this man in some kind of microwave-"
"No, because then the outside will still be all cold but the inside will be like molten lava. Plus, hello, metal arm in a microwave? Day one stuff, Pep. We'll cook him safely in a conventional oven." He said it with a determined nod as the doctors reached in with thick rubber gloves up to the biceps and fished out the man in the box. The reality of the situation seemed to hit everyone at about the same time and the place became instantly more active. The two doctors alone had trouble lifting the guy out. A couple interns rushed for rubber gloves and helped out.
The man's skin was a pale blue color that would look nice on a cake or a flower but less so on a person. He was solidly built, not an ounce of fat on him. One of the doctors clipped a heart rate monitor onto the end of the guy's right index finger. He seemed startled to already be getting a reading. "Um, I've never exactly done this before but um," the doctor stammered, staring a bit at the screen. "I'd think like, he shouldn't have a pulse right out of the ice like that. Or maybe at all, given the whole, frozen...thing."
"This is going to be an afternoon for learning," Tony said, steepling his fingers beneath his chin. The interns grimaced and kept patting down the guy's stiff limbs with towels, brushing away little crystals of ice and moisture.
"So much about this seems very, very wrong," Pepper said in a low voice. She seemed pretty cautious, like getting too close to the guy on the cot wasn't a good idea. Caution was probably warranted where metal armed men were concerned so Tony didn't fault her for it.
"Eh, it'll be fine. You'll see. The directions make it sound like this happens with some kind of regularity." He thought specifically of the orders to put the man on stand-by in the event of a power failure. There were plenty of questions and he supposed the best way of answering them was to ask the guy being unfrozen. "If he's sick we'll just do it all backwards and pop him back in there until his cure comes along or whatever."
"But why?" she asked. "I mean, why did Hammer have him? And then there's the arm...This doesn't make any sense. And why would they sell him to you? Where's the paperwork on your transaction? I'd be very interested to know if you just committed a serious crime by purchasing a human being."
"I told you, I didn't buy him. Mistakes were made." Tony shrugged. "Too late to worry about it now." Pepper seemed ready to debate everything he'd just said, but she must've noticed Tony's brows tugged together a bit and she followed his gaze to the man on the cot. Had that left arm just twitched? "Especially since he might be waking up already," Tony added, keeping his focus to be certain he hadn't just imagined it.
"Is it really that fast?" she asked in a whisper, like she didn't want to wake the man up. He didn't have an answer for her but he suspected that no, a human being shouldn't be moving ten minutes after being defrosted. The guy should be dead, if anything. Was this really a person? Or some unfinished, extremely lifelike android? There was quiet in the room as they all stared, transfixed by the arm. All five fingers drummed against the cot. Then each joint was flexed. The wrist rolled. Elbow bent. Shoulder rolled. Then there was a kind of whirring noise when all the metal plates snapped shut and it was like watching tall grasses ripple from a sudden gust of wind. Tony recognized it for what it was and he made the little Windows 95 booting up noise, a joke obviously lost on the younger interns. Maybe two seconds after, the guy on the table gasped like he was drowning, back arching off the cot, fingers feebly grasping at the metal beneath it. Tony wasn't exactly sure why, but he put himself between Pepper and the man. He'd be all floppy and weak after being frozen alive so surely he couldn't hurt anyone right away. Then he remembered that whole thing about how the guy shouldn't be alive at all and decided it was best if he stopped making assumptions.
"Sir, are you okay?" one of the doctors asked, a hand on the right arm. The man jerked away and seemed to try to focus but failed.
"You hear us? You understand us?" the other asked. The man's head jerked in that direction now and he blinked a lot.
The guy kept gasping but his hands seemed to relax a little. "A-a-ffirm-mative," he managed to stammer out through uncontrollable shivering. His voice was deceptively soft when taken in the context of his frame and the scary looking scars where the metal arm met the body. Tony had heard of people getting pins in their bones or metal in their hips or whatever, but nothing like this. Most prosthetics were supposed to at least try to work comfortably with the person's body. This looked more like someone had peeled back the man's skin, shoved metal plating underneath, and then slapped the skin back over parts of it. Even if that was a crude interpretation, Tony considered the amount of pain that would come with a procedure where this was the end product and it left him with even more questions. Like was that a voluntary procedure, and if so why? And if not, why the hell?
"Okay, we're gonna warm you up, don't worry," the first doctor said. The guy's eyes rolled around in his head like he couldn't force himself to focus on any one thing and he blinked rapidly. Tony approached, blanket in hand because of course he was right about it being necessary. He handed it over to the doctor, and the guy's eyes went to it immediately. Then they flicked to Tony.
"Hi," Tony said for lack of anything more useful to do. The guy probably wasn't up for a chat just yet but was trying to stammer something out anyway. Tony just shook his head. "You don't have to talk right now with all the coldness and the frost." He waved with one open palm, the man's eyes following the gesture. "God knows I don't have that kind of time," Tony said. "Just get cozy. They'll take care of you and we'll discuss uh, whatever your deal is and then go from there."
The guy was trying so hard to pay attention but it was kind of obvious he didn't understand. There were a few hard blinks, his hands twitched like he wanted to do something with them but wasn't sure what, and he opted for slowly rolling his head to one side and then the other when he didn't get whatever he was looking for. "Jarvis," Pepper said from behind Tony. "The lights, please. I think they're too bright."
"Of course, Miss Potts." And the lights went low without leaving the doctors to work in the dark. The mismatched pair of hands stilled for a moment before settling back down.
"Tony." He took his eyes off the guy/potential android and turned them to Pepper who'd said his name in a weird tone that was some mix of all the authority in the world, some uncertainty, and a pinch of pity. "Can we talk?"